Not sure if this is a software issue, a networking issue, or what

I'm not sure where to post this as there are several issues going on. This is going to be long because I’m going to explain all the issues and I have no idea whether they are related or not.

About 2 weeks ago, the server at the agency I work for crashed. At that time, we decided to make the switch from running Windows Server to a Linux system along with getting a brand new machine. I dabble in server configuration and networking, but I am by no means a network administrator, so we have a company that we contract all this kind of stuff out to. They came in, did their thing, and with the exception of a few minor adjustments for several users over the course of following days, things went pretty smoothly. A week ago Thursday, we also had two new Xerox copiers installed on our network. They are all-in-one machines that have scanning and emailing capabilities. Late last Friday afternoon, several different users reported problems printing a particular Excel document to the new copiers. Specifically, they couldn’t resize the document. No big deal. I fixed that and life went on. Monday afternoon a user came to me saying that several documents that she had scanned from one of the copiers, emailed to herself, and then forwarded to another agency were unable to be opened by the recipient. I didn’t have a chance to look into it until the next day. By Tuesday afternoon, while I was still trying to figure out what was going on, I had several other users with the same issue, only not just scanned documents, but also regular attachments from their local machines. Word, Publisher, some picture files…ordinary stuff. Sometimes the attachments were fine, other times corrupt. No rhyme or reason. Then yesterday, late in the afternoon, several users reported getting delayed write errors indicating they had temporarily lost their connection to the server. I have to mention here that when we had the new server installed, they told us that it was probably time to start thinking about upgrading the network, citing potential bandwidth issues down the road if network traffic started to increase much more. So I'm guessing the delayed write issue might be an indication of this. The email issues seem limited to three users as far as I can tell, but there is no way to tell for sure since even from those three, it's a random thing. The delayed write failures are from 2 other users and one with the email issue.

I’ve looked a every possible cause I can think of for the corruption issue ~ firewall, antivirus, mail format, ISP issues and everything else under the sun. I finally called in the company who installed the server, hoping they could uncover the issue. They were here for 3 hours yesterday helping me sort through potential causes, but we came up empty.

I’m at a complete loss here and issues are cropping up so quickly that my head is spinning . I can’t even think straight any more. Anybody have any ideas?? I'm considering taking one of the machines that is having issues and wiping it then reinstalling everything just to see if it fixes whatever is going on. I really don't want to if I don't have to though especially since I'm just grasping at straws in hopes that it might work.

 

Greetings, twinmms.

I know what I'd do if I were in your shoes. I'd start from scratch, which meshes with your penultimate statement:

Strip the network down to the basics, then build it up until you make it crash.

 

:sigh: I was afraid you were going to say that...